This essay examines local news coverage of abortion stories during the year following the United States Supreme Court decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), in states with trigger bans and states considering legislation to severely restrict abortion. Framing theory stipulates that news narratives are never neutral. The way stories are structured inevitably foregrounds certain themes while pushing others to the margins (Chong and Druckman Reference Chong and Druckman2007; Pope, Pelletier, and Guertin Reference Pope, Pelletier and Guertin2018). We analyzed 1600 local news articlesFootnote
1 for the presence of thematic frames, which focus on the big-picture context of a political event, and episodic frames, which more closely resemble a case study (Feezell, Glazier, and Boydstun Reference Feezell, Glazier and Boydstun2021; Iyengar Reference Iyengar1994). Our initial framing analysis found that only a small handful of articles, 66 out of 1,600, used episodic frames to tell the abortion stories of individuals.Footnote
2
Our analysis identified four main themes in abortion storytelling across these 66 episodically framed articles: abortion stories of minors needing abortion access following sexual assault; stories of women with medical emergencies who faced obstacles in seeking an abortion due to state-level bans; celebrity abortion stories; pre-Dobbs abortion stories. Our analysis also exposed significant gaps in local news coverage, highlighting the absence of stories featuring women of color, poor women, transgender individuals, and women seeking abortions outside the context of a medical emergency. We thus find that the narrow focus of medical crisis cases constructs abortion as a rare and tragic necessity rather than a fundamental part of women’s health care and an issue of bodily autonomy. We argue that the stories told did not represent the full range of circumstances that lead pregnant people to seek abortions and risk narrowing abortion’s political meaning by obscuring the broader social, economic, and structural forces that shape reproductive decision-making.
Abortion Following Sexual Assault
The first major theme we found across the articles involved stories of minors needing abortion care following a sexual assault. Five articles focused specifically on minors, and each story emphasized the criminal nature of these cases. In all five articles, the minors were ultimately able to obtain abortions, but each had to travel out of state to access care. The coverage highlighted the additional burden this travel placed on minors and their families, compounding the pain and trauma of the sexual assault. One article in the Ashland Times Gazette (Ohio) featured the story of a 10-year-old girl from Ohio who had to travel to Indiana to seek an abortion after being raped multiple times by a 27-year-old man. There were multiple stories about the case of this 10-year-old girl in our analysis, and this was a story that made national headlines. The perpetrator is referred to as a “child rapist,” and the article notes that there were at least 50 police reports of rape or sexual abuse involving girls 15 years or younger in the Columbus, Ohio, area in 2022. Collectively, stories in this theme illustrate the compounded harms minors face when abortion policies lack clear exceptions for rape and incest.
Abortion as a Medical Emergency
We identified a second set of stories of pregnant people facing medical emergencies who encountered barriers to abortion care due to state-level bans or restrictions, including financial burdens, out-of-state travel, delays in care, and physicians refusing treatment. A story in The Albany Herald recounted the experiences of two women with wanted pregnancies whose doctors refused to perform legal and medically necessary abortions. One woman described the painful moment she learned during an ultrasound that her fetus had a severe condition associated with stillbirth and little to no chance of survival beyond a few days. She ultimately had to travel out of state to obtain an abortion. Such narratives frame abortion restrictions as immediate, life-altering barriers rather than abstract policy debates, while also reinforcing the idea that abortion is a tragic necessity tied to wanted pregnancies and thwarted motherhood (Skinner Reference Skinner2012). This focus on wanted pregnancies with complications overlooks the social and economic reasons that lead pregnant people to seek an abortion.
Celebrity Abortion Stories
References to celebrity abortion stories were the focus of a third group of articles. Local news outlets often picked up national wire reports on celebrities who disclosed having an abortion, and some of these stories ran in multiple local outlets. We observed the following celebrity abortion stories in our dataset: Chrissy Teigen, Paris Hilton, and Jessa Duggar Seewald. Duggar Seewald’s abortion story is the only case of a celebrity seeking an abortion in the post-Dobbs era. Two of these celebrity abortion stories occurred due to medical emergencies, and one involved a case of exercising bodily autonomy during the era of Roe v. Wade protections.
The selection of these stories from national news wire outlets by more locally based newspapers reflects how news norms value stories from widely recognizable, high-profile figures (Gans Reference Gans1980). A celebrity who needs an abortion, for whatever reason, in the post-Dobbs era will likely have the resources, knowledge, and ability to either obtain mifepristone online or travel to a state where the abortion can be performed. These narratives can lead readers to think that abortion is easily accessible for individuals even if they live in a state restricting abortion care. For many women, as our theme on medical emergencies uncovered, seeking an abortion is difficult, requires multiple logistical challenges, and is costly.
Abortion in the Pre-Dobbs Era
Finally, our coding recorded cases of personal abortion stories told in the immediate wake of the Dobbs decision. Many of these stories were about women who obtained abortion under the protections of Roe v. Wade. These pre-Dobbs stories appear intended to normalize abortion as health care and signal to readers what pregnant people stand to lose without the protection of Roe. One article that exemplified these themes was printed in the South Bend Tribune (Indiana) on July 3, 2022, while the state of Indiana was considering a full abortion ban. The article shared the stories of five women who sought abortions for a variety of reasons, from being too young to being financially unstable. The women in this article did not all end up having an abortion, but still discussed the barriers they faced even under the protections of Roe. These barriers included waiting periods, listening to medically incorrect information about abortion, and being required to listen to the fetal heartbeat. This particular article was one of the only ones that highlighted abortion stories of women seeking abortion but not experiencing a medical emergency.
We also found at least two abortion stories preceding Roe in an article printed by the Quad-City Times in Iowa on May 3, 2022 — one day after Politico leaked the Dobbs decision but almost six weeks before the actual decision was issued. This article told the story of a young, single mother pregnant with her fourth child who sought an abortion while 24 weeks pregnant because preeclampsia threatened her health and she already had three young children. The woman was not able to successfully obtain an abortion and died from pregnancy complications. Her three children that she left behind told how their mother’s death created generational trauma that still ricochets through their family.
From our analysis, this was the only story where someone died because of their inability to access timely and life-saving abortion care. This story stands in contrast to the other abortion stories where women faced challenges receiving abortion but survived the medical procedure. Stories with unhappy and tragic endings were not common in our analysis. This preference in the news media for stories of challenges that ultimately met with success suggests an adherence to media norms and values that prioritize dramatic stories that ultimately end happily.
Abortion Frames and Their Limits
The four abortion storytelling themes we uncovered show how local news coverage shapes the political meaning of abortion in consequential ways. As framing theory suggests, narratives are never neutral (Chong and Druckman Reference Chong and Druckman2007; Pope, Pelletier, and Guertin Reference Pope, Pelletier and Guertin2018). We found that episodic stories centered on medical emergencies, minors, and emotionally compelling cases dominated the post-Dobbs local news coverage. By positioning abortion as legitimate only in exceptional, crisis-driven cases, local news coverage risks narrowing the political meaning of abortion. What is missing from these stories is as telling as what is present: the everyday experiences of women of color, poor women, and transgender individuals whose reproductive decision-making is shaped by intersecting social, economic, and structural conditions have yet to be adequately addressed by local news.
The narrow focus we observed also sidesteps bigger critical conversations about privilege, including who still has the resources, mobility, and financial means to seek access to abortion care when states exert greater control over reproductive healthcare. Of course, we should also acknowledge that women experiencing medical emergencies requiring abortion may be more willing to come forward with their stories compared to women and pregnant people seeking abortions but not experiencing a medical emergency. Individuals with medical emergencies are more likely to garner empathy for requiring an abortion even if pregnancy and childbirth are their ultimate goal, while those seeking an abortion for another reason may fear and worry about moral judgment from the public.
The way local news outlets told abortion stories in the first year after Dobbs likely has substantive effects on people’s awareness of abortion bans and people’s support for maintaining some level of abortion access at the state level (Hernandez, Trubowitz, and Zacher Reference Hernandez, Trubowitz and Zacher2025; Norrander and Wilcox Reference Norrander and Wilcox2023; Roberti, Morgan, and Krumbholz Reference Roberti, Morgan and Krumbholz2026). While this is outside the scope of our essay, future work that unpacks the effects of the Dobbs decision should consider the informational context in which people form preferences about existing policy regimes around abortion in their states. News stories and their framing can shape which abortion-related policies are perceived as necessary or reasonable at the local level in addition to affecting vote choice decisions about candidates (Sirin and Villalobos Reference Sirin and Villalobos2024). This is why we focused specifically on local news in states that banned or sought to ban abortion because local news outlets are powerfully positioned to explain the consequences of state and local policies for citizens living in these places.
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This essay examines local news coverage of abortion stories during the year following the United States Supreme Court decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), in states with trigger bans and states considering legislation to severely restrict abortion. Framing theory stipulates that news narratives are never neutral. The way stories are structured inevitably foregrounds certain themes while pushing others to the margins (Chong and Druckman Reference Chong and Druckman2007; Pope, Pelletier, and Guertin Reference Pope, Pelletier and Guertin2018). We analyzed 1600 local news articlesFootnote 1 for the presence of thematic frames, which focus on the big-picture context of a political event, and episodic frames, which more closely resemble a case study (Feezell, Glazier, and Boydstun Reference Feezell, Glazier and Boydstun2021; Iyengar Reference Iyengar1994). Our initial framing analysis found that only a small handful of articles, 66 out of 1,600, used episodic frames to tell the abortion stories of individuals.Footnote 2
Our analysis identified four main themes in abortion storytelling across these 66 episodically framed articles: abortion stories of minors needing abortion access following sexual assault; stories of women with medical emergencies who faced obstacles in seeking an abortion due to state-level bans; celebrity abortion stories; pre-Dobbs abortion stories. Our analysis also exposed significant gaps in local news coverage, highlighting the absence of stories featuring women of color, poor women, transgender individuals, and women seeking abortions outside the context of a medical emergency. We thus find that the narrow focus of medical crisis cases constructs abortion as a rare and tragic necessity rather than a fundamental part of women’s health care and an issue of bodily autonomy. We argue that the stories told did not represent the full range of circumstances that lead pregnant people to seek abortions and risk narrowing abortion’s political meaning by obscuring the broader social, economic, and structural forces that shape reproductive decision-making.
Abortion Following Sexual Assault
The first major theme we found across the articles involved stories of minors needing abortion care following a sexual assault. Five articles focused specifically on minors, and each story emphasized the criminal nature of these cases. In all five articles, the minors were ultimately able to obtain abortions, but each had to travel out of state to access care. The coverage highlighted the additional burden this travel placed on minors and their families, compounding the pain and trauma of the sexual assault. One article in the Ashland Times Gazette (Ohio) featured the story of a 10-year-old girl from Ohio who had to travel to Indiana to seek an abortion after being raped multiple times by a 27-year-old man. There were multiple stories about the case of this 10-year-old girl in our analysis, and this was a story that made national headlines. The perpetrator is referred to as a “child rapist,” and the article notes that there were at least 50 police reports of rape or sexual abuse involving girls 15 years or younger in the Columbus, Ohio, area in 2022. Collectively, stories in this theme illustrate the compounded harms minors face when abortion policies lack clear exceptions for rape and incest.
Abortion as a Medical Emergency
We identified a second set of stories of pregnant people facing medical emergencies who encountered barriers to abortion care due to state-level bans or restrictions, including financial burdens, out-of-state travel, delays in care, and physicians refusing treatment. A story in The Albany Herald recounted the experiences of two women with wanted pregnancies whose doctors refused to perform legal and medically necessary abortions. One woman described the painful moment she learned during an ultrasound that her fetus had a severe condition associated with stillbirth and little to no chance of survival beyond a few days. She ultimately had to travel out of state to obtain an abortion. Such narratives frame abortion restrictions as immediate, life-altering barriers rather than abstract policy debates, while also reinforcing the idea that abortion is a tragic necessity tied to wanted pregnancies and thwarted motherhood (Skinner Reference Skinner2012). This focus on wanted pregnancies with complications overlooks the social and economic reasons that lead pregnant people to seek an abortion.
Celebrity Abortion Stories
References to celebrity abortion stories were the focus of a third group of articles. Local news outlets often picked up national wire reports on celebrities who disclosed having an abortion, and some of these stories ran in multiple local outlets. We observed the following celebrity abortion stories in our dataset: Chrissy Teigen, Paris Hilton, and Jessa Duggar Seewald. Duggar Seewald’s abortion story is the only case of a celebrity seeking an abortion in the post-Dobbs era. Two of these celebrity abortion stories occurred due to medical emergencies, and one involved a case of exercising bodily autonomy during the era of Roe v. Wade protections.
The selection of these stories from national news wire outlets by more locally based newspapers reflects how news norms value stories from widely recognizable, high-profile figures (Gans Reference Gans1980). A celebrity who needs an abortion, for whatever reason, in the post-Dobbs era will likely have the resources, knowledge, and ability to either obtain mifepristone online or travel to a state where the abortion can be performed. These narratives can lead readers to think that abortion is easily accessible for individuals even if they live in a state restricting abortion care. For many women, as our theme on medical emergencies uncovered, seeking an abortion is difficult, requires multiple logistical challenges, and is costly.
Abortion in the Pre-Dobbs Era
Finally, our coding recorded cases of personal abortion stories told in the immediate wake of the Dobbs decision. Many of these stories were about women who obtained abortion under the protections of Roe v. Wade. These pre-Dobbs stories appear intended to normalize abortion as health care and signal to readers what pregnant people stand to lose without the protection of Roe. One article that exemplified these themes was printed in the South Bend Tribune (Indiana) on July 3, 2022, while the state of Indiana was considering a full abortion ban. The article shared the stories of five women who sought abortions for a variety of reasons, from being too young to being financially unstable. The women in this article did not all end up having an abortion, but still discussed the barriers they faced even under the protections of Roe. These barriers included waiting periods, listening to medically incorrect information about abortion, and being required to listen to the fetal heartbeat. This particular article was one of the only ones that highlighted abortion stories of women seeking abortion but not experiencing a medical emergency.
We also found at least two abortion stories preceding Roe in an article printed by the Quad-City Times in Iowa on May 3, 2022 — one day after Politico leaked the Dobbs decision but almost six weeks before the actual decision was issued. This article told the story of a young, single mother pregnant with her fourth child who sought an abortion while 24 weeks pregnant because preeclampsia threatened her health and she already had three young children. The woman was not able to successfully obtain an abortion and died from pregnancy complications. Her three children that she left behind told how their mother’s death created generational trauma that still ricochets through their family.
From our analysis, this was the only story where someone died because of their inability to access timely and life-saving abortion care. This story stands in contrast to the other abortion stories where women faced challenges receiving abortion but survived the medical procedure. Stories with unhappy and tragic endings were not common in our analysis. This preference in the news media for stories of challenges that ultimately met with success suggests an adherence to media norms and values that prioritize dramatic stories that ultimately end happily.
Abortion Frames and Their Limits
The four abortion storytelling themes we uncovered show how local news coverage shapes the political meaning of abortion in consequential ways. As framing theory suggests, narratives are never neutral (Chong and Druckman Reference Chong and Druckman2007; Pope, Pelletier, and Guertin Reference Pope, Pelletier and Guertin2018). We found that episodic stories centered on medical emergencies, minors, and emotionally compelling cases dominated the post-Dobbs local news coverage. By positioning abortion as legitimate only in exceptional, crisis-driven cases, local news coverage risks narrowing the political meaning of abortion. What is missing from these stories is as telling as what is present: the everyday experiences of women of color, poor women, and transgender individuals whose reproductive decision-making is shaped by intersecting social, economic, and structural conditions have yet to be adequately addressed by local news.
The narrow focus we observed also sidesteps bigger critical conversations about privilege, including who still has the resources, mobility, and financial means to seek access to abortion care when states exert greater control over reproductive healthcare. Of course, we should also acknowledge that women experiencing medical emergencies requiring abortion may be more willing to come forward with their stories compared to women and pregnant people seeking abortions but not experiencing a medical emergency. Individuals with medical emergencies are more likely to garner empathy for requiring an abortion even if pregnancy and childbirth are their ultimate goal, while those seeking an abortion for another reason may fear and worry about moral judgment from the public.
The way local news outlets told abortion stories in the first year after Dobbs likely has substantive effects on people’s awareness of abortion bans and people’s support for maintaining some level of abortion access at the state level (Hernandez, Trubowitz, and Zacher Reference Hernandez, Trubowitz and Zacher2025; Norrander and Wilcox Reference Norrander and Wilcox2023; Roberti, Morgan, and Krumbholz Reference Roberti, Morgan and Krumbholz2026). While this is outside the scope of our essay, future work that unpacks the effects of the Dobbs decision should consider the informational context in which people form preferences about existing policy regimes around abortion in their states. News stories and their framing can shape which abortion-related policies are perceived as necessary or reasonable at the local level in addition to affecting vote choice decisions about candidates (Sirin and Villalobos Reference Sirin and Villalobos2024). This is why we focused specifically on local news in states that banned or sought to ban abortion because local news outlets are powerfully positioned to explain the consequences of state and local policies for citizens living in these places.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X26101159.